In today’s complex social world, psychotherapists are increasingly called to address issues of social justice – in work with clients, in relationships with colleagues, and in broader personal and professional contexts. This special issue gathers innovative approaches to working with embodied experiences of oppression through body, movement, and dance psychotherapy. Articles in the collection highlight how questions of power, privilege and difference are embedded within, and enacted through, embodied encounters with clients and explore how therapists navigate their own social locations and identifications in the therapeutic relationship.
The articles selected for this special include research papers, case studies, clinical reflections, and theoretical essays that help to deepen our understanding of how the body is implicated in oppressive social dynamics and how it may also serve as an essential resource in cultivating capacities for resistance, resilience, and accountability. In keeping with the scope of the journal, contributors are drawn from many countries, and from within higher education as well as clinical practice. We are particularly pleased to include authors whose voices and perspectives have historically been under-represented in the field.
In Diversity and culture as psychophysiological phenomena and states of being, Tom Warnecke explores the psychophysiological phenomena associated with diversity and culture in the therapeutic relationship and considers ways to constructively engage with their complex dynamics. The author argues that while many therapists still neglect diversity and culture as key elements of client/therapist engagement, the client’s experience of feeling ‘culturally met’ seems crucial to a genuinely attuned therapeutic relationship.
While body psychotherapy has begun to research the embodied experience of oppression and explore models for working somatically with the traumatic impact of oppression, the field has yet to address how somatic psychotherapy can support clients in navigating the embodied experience of internalised oppression (specifically, negative beliefs about the self which originate in oppression). In Working with internalised oppression through body psychotherapy, Rebecca Holohan presents a new theory for working clinically with internalised oppression which addresses the gap in the research by exploring how somatic awareness, sensation tracking, and somatic resourcing can support individuals in cultivating resistance and resilience.
Olivia Streater’s survey of contemporary approaches to trauma within dance movement therapy suggests that this modality is effectively positioned to work with individual and collective trauma. In Truth, justice and bodily accountability: dance movement therapy for trauma, Streater argues that the approaches surveyed successfully reflected the diverse life experiences of clients embedded in systems perpetuating harm and that dance offered a flexible and multimodal container for interventions targeting the interrelated goals of safety, agency and freedom.
In Acknowledging the past: Trauma informed social justice and dance movement therapy, Tosha Lanette Jorden examines historical traumas and their impact on working psychotherapeutically within similarities and across differences. Through an examination of specific historical events – such as the Tuskegee University syphilis study and the pathologizing of African American slaves through the clinical diagnosis of drapetomania – this article examines racist ideologies in the United States and how they are woven into the institutions, organisations, and interpersonal relationships that inform how psychotherapy is enacted and experienced. A theoretical model that assists clinicians in tracking their power, privilege, and prejudice is presented, and the use of dance movement therapy props to support trauma-informed social justice care is discussed.
Rachele Preda’s research investigates power dynamics in dance movement therapy, uncovering potential blind spots in the discourse about power in the profession and highlighting a tendency in the field towards polarised thinking. In their article for this special issue, the author articulates some of the underexplored aspects of the manifestation of power in the therapeutic setting and suggests the need to hold space for a non-binary approach to responding to it. According to Preda, when dance movement therapists deepen their awareness of the implications of their own socio-cultural backgrounds and theoretical frameworks on their embodied approaches to the therapeutic and human relationship with their patients, they are better able to practice culturally-sensitive embodied ethical decision-making.
According to Laia Jorba Galdos and Marcia Warren Edelman, the increasing number of psychotherapy clients with multicultural backgrounds presents an important challenge for mainstream mental health counselling – a field that has historically approached the psychological concerns of culturally diverse clients as if one’s cultural identities could be understood simplistically and monolithically. In their article, The body as cultural home: exploring, embodying, and navigating the complexities of multiple identities, the authors explore the body’s role in identity development and argue that this crucial site of cultural identity has not been fully integrated in the theory and practice of counselling. The authors address this gap by advocating for a somatic psychotherapy process of identity exploration that navigates multiple cultural locations and backgrounds. Using a composite case example to illustrate the process, Jorba Galdos and Warren Edelman argue for the need for counselling to support more congruent hybrid identities that promise to transform the vulnerabilities of this population into resiliencies.
Taken together, the articles in this special issue represent a leading edge of innovative thinking and practice with respect to social-justice informed psychotherapy. By intentionally and explicitly incorporating embodied experience into the process of exploring the traumatic impact of oppression, these approaches harness a crucial site of potential individual and collective transformation – the muscles, tissues, sensations, and movement impulses that shape (and are shaped by) our experiences, relationships, and engagement with the world.
This special issue concludes with a memorial tribute to David Boadella, a luminary whose life work has shaped the field of body psychotherapy for many decades. We are indebted to him for his many innovative theoretical and practical contributions and for his commitment to the liberation of the human soma.
Pacifica Graduate Institute, California, USA
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